ABSTRACT
Bill Clinton had several “firsts” when he took office in 1993. He was the first “Baby Boomer” president, born a year after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. Bill Clinton was also the first president since 1945 not to have been in the military. Newt Gingrich’s friends observed that he produced a hundred ideas daily, of which five might be good. Crime rates began to fall by the late 1990s, though there was no consensus as to why. Democrats were growing bitter after 2010, and not just because they lost the House, along with hundreds of state legislative seats across the country. Liberals had believed that Barack Obama represented a departure from George W. Bush's foreign policy. Sixty-one percent of House Democrats and 44 percent of Senate Democrats voted against military intervention in Iraq. While Afghanistan had been a war of necessity, Iraq was a war of “choice.” Moreover, anti-American insurgents were still at large in Afghanistan.
